Mads Matthiesen’s compassionate drama, starring real life bodybuilder (and excellent actor) Kim Kold, looks at the emotional limitations of someone with such physical prowess. The man’s outside tells one story, but his interior life is quite another in this winner of Sundance’s Best Directing award.
With its sunny Corsica setting and milieu of teenage foolery, this Directors’ Fortnight film might seem the antidote to chilly autumn days—but look again. Corsican director Thierry de Peretti’s first feature, reminiscent of Larry Clark and Bully, follows its enthralling youth down a dark path.
Mickey Rourke is…St. Francis of Assisi! Director Liliana Cavani (infamous for The Night Porter, should be known for the best Ripley adaptation, Ripley’s Game) catches the intensely beautiful Rourke at the height of his career. With Helena Bonham Carter as St. Claire, and music by Vangelis.
Our next flamboyant Johnnie To thriller finds him solo in the director’s seat, less silly and more politically prickly. Opening with one of cinema’s greatest shots—a one-take, ten minute action scene, the craned camera gymnastically following the bullets—cops, robbers and the media are all skewered.
Two of Hong Kong master Johnnie To’s (Election, Drug War) most stylish thrillers back-to-back! This Andy Lau vehicle (in a rare villain role!) is a giddily inspired melding of To’s grandiose approach to action and co-director Wai Ka-fai’s surreal wackiness, replete with self-aware movie references.
Audacious to a fault, director Mads Brügger visited the Central African Republic as a fictitious ambassador to see how far a white face and the promise of money could get him. Where his The Red Chapel gave us vital images of North Korea, this cine-prank is more about the journey than the discovery.
Another reminder that genre cinema—one of the movie’s greatest pleasures, challenging audience expectations of pleasure and suspense—is alive full and well…outside of Hollywood. This lean thriller from the Philippines does much with little, shooting on location and not afraid to get dirty.
We’ve partnered with Influence Film Club, whose mission is to grow and engage audiences for documentary film, to present this essential doc on crimes perpetrated inside the military. Influence has created a rich discussion guide so that the conversation started by the film may continue with you.
Our final Horrific October film—and 2nd adaptation of Poe’s “The Black Cat”—is a stylized horror film from genre legend Lucio Fulci. Transplanted to an English village terrorized in equal parts by the cat menace and Fulci’s thrilling camera, it stars Mimsy Farmer and Patrick Magee. Happy Halloween!
We conclude our Horrific October with a double feature of loose Italian adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic thrilling tale, “The Black Cat.” This being Italian genre cinema of the 1970s, its equal parts horror and eroticism, a giallo where nearly everyone ends up nude—or dead.
This awards magnet (including four Césars) from actress, writer and director Agnès Jaoui is precisely the kind of movie the French do so well: a witty dissection of a social set that’s smart, funny, off-hand and decidedly erudite. Featuring Jaoui’s frequent collaborator, Jean-Pierre Bacri.
Over the next month, we celebrate Hong Kong dreamboat Tony Leung Chiu-wai (In the Mood for Love) with two thrilling masterpieces of genre cinema. In this modern classic, Leung meets his match across the line of the law in superstar rival Andy Lau, inspiring two sequels and remade as The Departed.
We like Belgian director Fabrice Du Welz for his arty, European take on genre filmmaking. The references are pure American cinema but the manic energy of the cast, camera and filmmakers is something all its own. For the Notebook, we spoke to Du Welz about his great follow-up, Alleluia.
Through archival footage and new interviews filmmakers Sam Green and Bill Siegel have crafted a critical document of America’s radical left in the 1970s at the height of the civil rights movement. This is incendiary political documentary filmmaking at its finest.
Another silent horror that, through the mystery of cinema, gets creepier as it recedes into a black and white past that suggests a documentary of the time and not a fiction. A premise of unbeatable inspiration, with the great Conrad Veidt directed by the creator of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
You don’t need sound to be terrified. Off-brand at the time (thus, Nosferatu and not Dracula), F.W. Murnau’s Expressionist masterpiece is now iconic horror. Its spare medieval atmosphere and Max Schreck’s iconic, otherworldly vampire seems to get increasingly eerie and disturbing as the film ages.
A part of the official selection of the 2004 Venice Film Festival, Argentine director Pablo Trapero’s film is a hidden gem of this century’s world cinema. A light-hearted yet consistently rich emotionalism makes this family road movie a distinct pleasure.
A joyous celebration of the B-movie and an overdose of 80s aesthetics lend Miami Connection part of its unique charm. It’s a symphony of bad taste, goofy humor, stunning martial arts and is likely to be the greatest cult movie you’ve yet to see.
Vietnamese-French director Trần Anh Hùng (The Scent of Green Papaya) goes to Japan to adapt one of the most beloved novels of the 20th century. He brought with him Jonny Greenwood’s music and Mark Lee Ping-bin’s gorgeous photography to envelope you in Murakami’s melancholy romance of self-discovery.
Our next Jesús Franco horror flick contends with Female Vampire as to which crams the most unnecessary, ridiculous and unforgettable eroticism, exposed skin and 70s violence into the least amount of story. But where that film had vampires, this one has possessed nuns. Danger: witch-hunting ahead!
Madly prodigious (over 200 productions!) and madly inspired Spanish genre stylist Jesús Franco cast his wife Lina Romay as a female vampire on the prowl. Female vampire…the 1970s…Jesús Franco: Signposts of warning not just of horror ahead but of also of truly plenteous nudity and sex.
We close our series bringing you films from the NYFF’s Projections with this year’s Kazuko Trust Award winner. A provocative Hollywood pitch from an independent Maine filmmaker—told over frozen images of the local landscape—turns into something else: darker, sardonic, self-reflexive and playful.
An unconventional film in a series of unconventional cinema fresh from the NYFF’s Projections section. Ismaïl Bahri’s seemingly simple film—reminiscent of Abbas Kiarostami—is a play of light and color tones and rich in diverse conversation over the meaning of filming, tourism, one’s home, and more.
Fresh from the NYFF’s Projection strand of adventurous cinema is something completely unexpected: a micro-scaled musical about the search for a lost father, shot to look like a 1970s blaxploitation, and founded in the religious and cultural practices of the French island of Réunion. Stunning.
Our next exclusive film fresh from the NYFF’s Projections program is an oblique, observationally rich documentary portrait of Syrian refugees stranded in Turkey. In this limbo a time capsule from the past is heard: President al-Assad trying to reach Reagan on the phone. The impotence of waiting.
Straight from the New York Film Festival, we exclusively bring you some of the best of its adventurous and mind-blowing Projections program. We begin with a micro-sized, giddy celluloid satire of the multiplex logos that play before movie screenings—made extra wry streamed rather than projected!
The Korean War. Nashville’s country music scene. Hollywood. The Wild West. Los Angeles. Studio rebel Robert Altman made his name skewering these mythic American stories in clever, star-studded, circus-like films. Now he travels overseas in this delightful exposé on the French fashion world.
Indie director Ti West followed the success of The House of the Devil with another visit to the American horror cinema of the 1980s. A crafty and fun haunted hotel film film shot for under a million, The Innkeepers is a ghost story that builds slowly, smartly, making much from its limited resources.
Our October is filled with a Rodriguez-Tarantino mash-up, 1970s sleaze, and silent terrors—and also indie surprises, like this week’s double feature of films by Ti West. His name jumped to attention with this thrillingly precise homage to classic American horror like Halloween.